Khael raised his head, scales flickering across his jaw, wings tearing wider with a snap of green flame. His voice cut like steel, low but unshakable.

"Then it's my turn."

His eyes met Shigeo's.

"SHIGEO…NOW!"

The shout was not loud, but it carried weight older than his thirteen years a command born of every path that had led to this moment.

Shigeo's palms clapped together. The Thousand Way lattice burst into being one final time white lightning etching a blueprint in the open air. Infinite futures spun outward, twisting, collapsing, until only one filament remained. One crimson thread pulsed with inevitability: the future where Sloth's fractured souls could be forced into a single blade.

"Protect Khael!" Shigeo barked. "This is the only thread!"

The veterans struck as one.

Zeke's magma erupted, walls of molten fire cutting off Sloth's reach.

Raiden's thunder lashed chains of lightning across the monster's arms, pinning them in place.

Kurozawa's Mirror Domain forced Sloth to strike himself, every shadow claw reflected back into its twin.

Each man moved with Eclipse precision, god-tier echoes burning against the tide.

The rookies bled into the plan.

Ceyla planted herself like stone before Khael, storm-barriers shrieking as Sloth's blows crashed against her trembling frame.

"KHAEL…DON'T YOU DARE…" she cried, the plea cracking into prayer.

Juno's bones split, gates screaming open. His fists became white fire as he intercepted blow after blow meant for the dragon-boy. He came up smiling through broken ribs.

"YOU. WILL. NOT. TOUCH. HIM!!!"

Kaen and Rael fought at Sloth's shoulders, teeth bared and eyes burning. Kaen had surrendered to the void within sixty percent, controlled, bestial and he tore into a chain with claws that burned black and red. "Take me," his snarl said without words. "Not him."

Rael's luminous wings carved scripture across the air; each feather sheared an aspect from Sloth's shadowlike limbs. "JUDICATOR—CUT!" His blade sang with law.

The battlefield moved like one body obeying a single brain. Shigeo's Thousand Way kept every piece in place, highlighting the perfect instant.

Khael felt it all the shield of friends, the pain of every sacrifice. He pressed his hands to the wound in his chest where dragon-blood remembered an older language. The Vein Gates burned beneath his skin: whispers of scales, of fire, of the dragon that had been and would not die quietly inside him.

(This is not just mine. This is ours. If Sloth eats me, he eats everything you gave me. I will not let it be an end. Not like this.)

He exhaled, slow as the sea taking a new tide. The Gate of Transcendence pressed at his temples the door to hybrid power, to a voice that could braid different hearts into one. He had trained for this with the Dragon's memories, bled through it with Shaia's pity, laughed through it under Shigeo's mockery. He would not could not fail them.

"OPEN," he said to himself, and with that one word he pushed.

The world burned bright. Veins across his body glowed emerald and silver; scales split open like armor that had been sealed for centuries. For a slash of time, Khael felt as if he were being poured through a narrow gate every memory, every promise, every friendship pressed into a blade.

Around him, the lattice thinned, the red filament lengthened. Shigeo's face went white; every line of his calculation converged on a single moment.

"THOUSAND WAY: ALIGN!" Shigeo cried.

And then the circle closed.

Khael's voice rose not a shout, but a dragon's bell, resonant and terrible. "ECLIPSE ART—DRAGONHEART SEVERANCE!"

He leapt not at Sloth's mass, but above it. Wings beat, not to smash, but to draw a hurricane of kin wind, storm, magma, judgment around his blade. The blade itself was no iron; it was a shaft of condensed Shinrei: Baek's wave, Milo's bloom, Juno's reinforced bone, Ceyla's storm, Shigeo's lightning lattice and Rael's law all threaded through Khael's dragon core until it shone like a spear of living unity.

Sloth laughed low and delighted because they were all there in that spear: a thousand feelings pressed into a single point. For the first time, the monster's faces many, layered flickered divided.

Chains whipped. Shadows lunged. The veterans screamed and tore, buying the hairbreadth of time Khael needed.

Khael drove the blade down.

The sound was a clean thing no crack, no thunder. It was the hinge of a door opening. The spear sank through Sloth's center of mass, through rag and meat and the tangled chorus of souls. For a heartbeat nothing happened but a dozen voices screaming, then folding over one another like birds colliding.

Sloth's grin split, and for the first time there was something like surprise in it.

"VOID ART—SOUL HANDS!" they howled, and a thousand ghost-hands ripped at the shaft, trying to pull it free. Their many identities rose to clutch it gluttony's hunger, lust's fever, greed's clinging whisper, pride's cold laugh but each was a single voice now, pressed sharp and ordered by the dragon-blade's purity.

Light flared. The spear burned like a sun. Souls—no longer a chorus but shards—sang different notes and then stuttered.

Around them, the veterans held on with everything: Zeke poured magma into the wound to cauterize it; Raiden sent chains of lightning into the air to keep the shadow-hands at bay; Kurozawa's mirror-planes forced every fragment of Sloth's self to face itself.

Sloth sagged. Their many mouths spoke in unison for the first time—an ugly, broken harmony that begged, pleaded, screamed.

"YOU… WILL… NOT… BECOME… ONE!" they rasped—then, softer, "I—"

The spear widened. Khael's knees buckled under the strain of hosting so many harmonies at once. Pain like new stars exploded behind his eyes. For a moment he felt the taste of collapse, his veins, the Gate's cost, the dragon-blood warning that this opening could redraft him forever.

Ceyla's hands burned as she kept the storm-wall steady around his feet. Juno's bones shattered and rebuilt under the strain of holding his stance. Kaen roared and ripped the final chain from Sloth where it tangled. Rael's wings sheared the last grasping spirits from the shaft.

And then like a bell struck once too many times Sloth cracked.

They did not die in an instant. Death of such a thing would be a lie too simple. Instead, the mountain of rags shuddered, and the many faces fell inward until one by one they peeled away like wet leaves, curling into quiet motes of black smoke that drifted, listless, away. For a breath, the room smelled like old rain and iron and something mournful.

Sloth collapsed to knees, then to elbows, then to the ground. For the first time they did not lift back up.

They lay there, breathing. The many voices were gone—gone or silent—and in their place was a single, small voice that sounded like wind through empty halls. It whispered, "Sleep."

Khael's blade slipped free. He staggered, the spear of unified Shinrei dissolving into sparks that the veterans gathered like embers. He fell to one knee, and the world rushed on him: pain like a new shape, the taste of iron, the constriction of too-eager Gates.

"KHAEL!" Ceyla's cry broke into the hush. Juno lunged, dropping to support him. Shigeo's Thousand Way snapped dark, then winked out, his hands trembling.

Khael looked at each of them faces drained, eyes wide with the cost of living. He tried to stand. His legs were a promise he no longer trusted.

(We did it—no, they did it. I just cut the knot.) he thought, and a wet warmth ran down his side. (we did….)

On the screen, Isen let out a breath he had not known he held. His fingers tightened around the Sealed Spear at his hip as if to remind himself why he still bore it.

Lucere tossed the popcorn aside. "So dramatic," he said, but his laugh was rawer now. "So very dramatic."

Isen's voice was quiet, almost a benediction. "You were right about sloth... But they—these children stronger than you could imagine… Their hearts are in sync as one… That's what makes them a human"

Lucere smiled in the dark. "Heh….We'll see how long they can keep their hearts together."

The battlefield held its breath. Sloth's body lay still, but not dead enough for comfort. Khael's chest rose and fell in shallow, painful spurts. Around him, the survivors made space, hands reaching, not to cleanse, but to keep what remained of one another warm.

They had won a terrible thing. They had paid a terrible price.

And somewhere far beyond the ruin, the world shifted as if a god had turned its head to notice that a mountain had fallen.

To be continue

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